By Eliza Carey
Kate Loble is a 22-year-old Montana-born artist who specializes in crochet and posts regularly on her business Instagram account promoting her work, which includes anything from stylish sweaters to silly hats. Her personal touch shines through each unique piece.
Her business name is GEEB, a childhood nickname that reminds her of wonder. Kate grew up in Helena, Montana practicing theater performance art, found a love for ceramics and utilizing her hands in high school. She then attempted to go to school for theater, but it fell through because of the pandemic. She would then spend the next three years with enough downtime to take up the hobby that would change her life: Crochet. She crocheted every day for a year and a half and then in the summer of 2023, her art really started to take off when she started making reels every day, reaching 78.1K views, and counting, on her most popular video. She is now enrolled at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington.
Eliza Carey, a University of Montana journalism student, interviewed Loble about social media recently in a study of best practices on social media. What follows in a transcript of their conversation, edited slightly for clarity and brevity.
Q: What does your process look like for promoting your work on social media?
A: It’s mostly filming. Honestly, my process isn’t that good, it’s very emotional. Like, I’ll start filming, and I’m just awkwardly talking about the piece or what I’m doing for way too long, and it’s like, people just want to see me do it. So then I’m cutting down the video to the very end. And that’s what I want to do, I want to film the final steps of my process, like maybe a little bit of the creative process, but mostly talking about the piece once it’s finished and kinda show that finished product to my audience. I also just work faster when I don’t have to record everything.” Q: What tactics have you seen work best?
A: Reels, obviously, like when I’m ‘making content,’ I’ll make a reel. I’ve done pretty well on TikTok, too, and the key is personality. Some people are attracted to more professionalism, but most people just want to get to know you and see your personality. I mean, one of my videos with the most views is literally just me being goofy and taking the audience along with me while I make a piece.
Q: What is the biggest struggle you have run into with sharing your work on social media?
A: It’s a whole other art form, it’s like a whole other skill. It takes graphic design, modeling, marketing, video editing, and I want to really learn a new skill to help promote my stuff, but the challenge there is that it would take time away from actually creating my art, so it’s kind of a difficult thing.
Q: What is your main goal when you post, and how successful have your strategies been?
A: If I had a more exact goal, I would be posting more effectively, but honestly my goal is just to inspire and maybe eventually be able to sell from it. I’ve never gotten any money from social media as an outlet, I’ve only made money from direct selling, whether that’s at the maker’s market or for a friend. I just want to focus on documenting the process of what I do. At the end of the day, I think my strategies have been successful because in person I get a lot of good feedback about what I’m doing, like, my friends think it’s cool and that feels good. Actually, one of my first days of school at Cornish, I met someone who recognized me from my Instagram account. It was shocking, but it made me happy. People know me by my art, like an extension of my persona, and it’s very validating and refreshing.
Q: What does your future look like with using social media to your benefit?
A: The video editing part of it all has been super inspirational for me. I want to get into video production, filming, editing, design and photo. I think my desire to learn more about those things has truly come from just making my own videos for my art page, and just the current space of social media makes me want to document my work. I don’t see this as long term, I want something bigger to come from it, but it’s helpful to know how to run your own shit, discipline yourself, it’s important for any art field.
This Q&A is part of a series created by students in Courtney Cowgill’s Social Media and Audience Engagement course at the University of Montana School of Journalism. Students sought out creatives who are doing using media for good to offer tips and insights into the ever-evolving landscape of social media.
Montana Journalism 